242 – The Dispossessed

The Doctor, Ace and Mel are caught in a forever night. After crossing the threshold, a strange world awaits them.

An army of tortured souls. A lift that leads to an alien landscape. An alien warlord, left for dead, and willing to do anything to prolong his life… it’s all in a day’s work for the Doctor.

But when his companions become victims of the desperate and powerful Arkallax, the Doctor will have to do battle in a psychic environment where he must make a choice. Save his companions… or himself.

1 Comment

Styre
on January 8, 2019 at 1:03 AM

THE DISPOSSESSED

The publicity told me that I was supposed to be excited for “The Dispossessed” because it’s written by Mark Morris, but why am I getting excited for someone who has never written even an above average Doctor Who story? My skepticism was warranted – “The Dispossessed” is badly written and only superficially entertaining.

Morris is a visual writer who really enjoys horror stories. He tries his best here: an army of zombies lurching through a dilapidated building groaning “Hungry” while that same building goes through horrific physical changes, ending in its elevators transforming into giant mouths with gnashing teeth. The problem, of course, is that these things are very difficult to communicate on audio, and Morris resorts to having the characters yell descriptions of things at each other. It’s the biggest, most elementary mistake you can make when writing something like this, and to this day we still see it far too often in Big Finish stories. Where’s the script editor? Even the science fiction elements are largely clichés: alien races at war, the aftermath of the war coming to Earth, alien technology far outstripping its human counterparts, and so forth. This isn’t inherently bad – I don’t expect Big Finish to reinvent the wheel – but there’s nothing surprising, nothing unpredictable about this. Any Doctor Who fan could read a synopsis and give a broad outline of the resolution.

As for the characterization, it’s all over the map. Morris’s dialogue is stilted and awkward, and the actors sound like they’re struggling mightily with the material. Sylvester McCoy’s performance is terrible – rushing through the script, stumbling over lines, getting twisted in knots by technobabble – and a far cry from some of the utter greatness he has produced with this company. The Doctor barely even sounds concerned about Mel or Ace, sounding slightly worried then blithely dismissing his concerns. As for Mel and Ace, this story is yet another opportunity to discuss why in the hell Big Finish put this pairing together. There’s absolutely no development in their relationship and absolutely no recognition (until the awful, crowbarred-in cliffhanger at the end) that these characters have changed in any meaningful sense whatsoever from their television personas. I understand this does not make a change from the endless series of stories that preceded this one, but something, anything different would be nice. The next story, which I haven’t heard, sounds like it’ll require Mel to be different, so it’ll be interesting to see how they fail to back that up.

The production is more interesting than usual. I’m becoming a big fan of Joe Kraemer’s scores – they actually sound different, making the listener sit up and take notice of particular scenes. Jamie Anderson’s direction isn’t bad, though it’s hard to make a flat script like this one seem exciting. The supporting cast is quite good, particularly Morgan Watkins as Ruck – and I must salute Morris for incorporating a homeless couple into his script and not patronizing or demeaning them in the process. Overall, though, “The Dispossessed” isn’t up to snuff. The plot is pedestrian, the dialogue is woeful, the central performance is poor, and the characterization is nonexistent. “Red Planets” wasn’t particularly great but at least it was trying something different – this is just bland and boring. And it’s not scary! But other than that…